A Cypriot court jailed a man on Friday for receiving sexual services from a human trafficking victim in a case prosecutors hailed as a milestone for the Mediterranean island.
“This is the first time that a ‘client’ has been convicted by a Cypriot court,” the state prosecution service said.
“The convicted person was sentenced today to concurrent prison sentences of 2.5 years and three years since he was also found guilty and sentenced for the crime of rape.”
According to evidence presented in court, the woman trafficked had been underaged when her ordeal began.
The person responsible for trafficking the woman was also on trial in the same case, with the Nicosia Criminal Court sentencing him to concurrent sentences of five and six years in prison.
He was convicted of trafficking the girl as a minor and an adult for sexual exploitation, financial violence, withholding personal documents, pimping, threatening violence, and common assault.
The prosecution service said it was also the first time a Cypriot court had convicted a person for “trafficking a minor, with the purpose of sexual exploitation”.
A third defendant in the case was given a four-month prison term for the crime of common assault.
It said the woman’s ordeal began when she was still underaged, without revealing how old she was when the traffickers started exploiting her or her nationality.
“The woman’s trafficker deprived her of the necessary means of living, pushing her towards prostitution.”
The ‘client’, as the prosecution service called him, was convicted of rape as the woman said she was forced to have unprotected intercourse with him.
“While the trafficking victim initially provided consensual sex services, in the process, these services ended up being non-consensual since it was clear from the complainant that she did not consent to unprotected vaginal intercourse,” the prosecution service said.
A 2020 European Commission report said Cyprus eclipsed all other EU countries for the number of identified or presumed victims of human trafficking relative to its population, with 168 per million people.
According to last year’s US State Department report on human trafficking, women from Eastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa are subjected to sex trafficking by traffickers operating in Cyprus.
It said Cypriot authorities convicted seven traffickers – two for sex trafficking and five for labour trafficking – last year, a decrease from the 10 traffickers convicted in 2021.
Between 2018 and 2020, there were no successful convictions of alleged human traffickers on the island.
